Instead of which, while there was no improvement in salary, all the little privileges and chances of emoluments were of necessity withdrawn. They were subjected to a far more rigorous rule of discipline than they had in their free-born manner been accustomed to in their former employment. In the old companies many averaged £2 a week at least, though there was no fixed rate of salary; but when the Government took them under its paternal care, there was no consideration made for what they had lost or left behind. The companies had been bought over lock, stock, and barrel, and the human machines, despised but indispensable, were thrown in as chattels and makeweight. The estates had been bought, and with them the serfs living on the land; and, being useful only to make the estates pay, they were, in the usual logic of the circumstances, least considered. The average wage was only 17s. or 18s. a week; there were no meal reliefs for provincial men; there was compulsory excessive overtime, in some cases for nothing, and in most cases next to nothing. They saw that if they were to obtain better treatment and fairer prospects, as befitted their new character as Government servants, they would have to fight for it. This they commenced doing by means of petition. But these petitions were either ignored or refused, and not the slightest concession was made. The compulsion to bring up their starvation pittance to a normal wage by an excessive amount of overtime, poorly paid for—often no more than threepence an hour—with also excessive punishment by the imposition of extra duty, without pay, for the most trifling errors, soon proved that they had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire. While the telegraph service was divided among a number of private companies, and while the telegraph clerks remained a limited class, they could play on the rivalry among the companies, and had things pretty much their own way when a grievance oppressed them. But under the new conditions of service they found that on the score of their serving the Crown instead of a private concern, they were expected to accept conditions and treatment which would not have been tolerated for a month under the old system. The eight hours’ day was reduced to a mere farce by the compulsion to earn anything approaching a decent livelihood only by means of miserably-paid overtime. They found that they were expected to pay dearly for the honour of serving a Government monopoly, and that, moreover, they were at the mercy of the department because it was a monopoly. Their hopes and expectations, based on the explicitly-worded clause in the Telegraph Act of 1868, were almost from the first moment of their entrance through the portals of the Post-Office dashed to the ground. They saw that the public and themselves had been hoodwinked by the specious promises held out to the old companies’ servants. They therefore decided to put the public in full possession of the facts of